Last May, I decided I’d try to make an actual film.
I’d made one before, but that was something I shot alone after planning a script for less than a day with only 1 actress. This time, I wanted to see what I could do if I tried for real.
I got in touch with a good friend of mine and we started bouncing some ideas.
Fast forward about 9 months, and we finally have something ready to release.
“Tokyo Solitude” is a short film set in a darker version of Tokyo. It tells 3 loosely connected stories about being alone in the modern world.
We tried to make it a nuanced take on solitude and loneliness from different perspectives – as this feeling is a lot more complicated than “I’m sad because no one likes me”.
Now, to be honest, I’m not sure how successful this attempt was. It was a fairly ambitious project for essentially a filmmaker with almost no experience. We ended up making 3 films and combining them to one. Some of the nuance was definitely lost due to my own inexperience in both writing and especially directing – it took me until the last day of filming to even start to understand what I was supposed to be doing as a director.
Oh, and there were 6 separate filming days, because we needed it to be raining. A few of those attempts failed because the forecast was wrong. And there were additional days when I’d be walking around Tokyo just by myself, trying to record 1 or 2 scenes of B-roll to plug in the middle of the film, just to enhance the mood.
But yeah, I learned so much during the process of writing and shooting this thing. Plus, it was a blast of a time.
Of course, after the shoot was wrapped, came the edit.
Earlier last year, in preparation to try and be more “serious”, coupled with the frustration with crashes and bad performance, I decided to switch from Premiere Pro to Davinci Resolve.
That was definitely a great decision, and editing this on Davinci has now made me quite comfortable with the new software.
I’ve always been bad at audio, so doing the sound design together with my friend Dan was also a big learning experience.
We had constant problems with some other software and syncing timelines accross two different Macbooks in two different countries, and I made my own job a lot harder than it needed to be by only having a vague script and no real storyboard except for a few frames. I learned how much more efficient I could have been, with better planning. So a 1 month edit probably took us … at least 4.
By the time we were finsihed with the edit, we are both sick of watching this thing. It’s kind of impossible to see your own film objectively once you’ve been so closely involved with both filming and editing it. To be honest, having someone else edit it would be helpful just for that chance to see it from a third person perspective.
Either way, with all the lessons I learned from this, I am now anxious to move onto the next film. But after all is said and done, I think we succeeded reasonably well to make a film that, at the very least, does a good job in building a cinematic, consistent mood. As far as the actual storyline goes, I have no idea how it’ll be received by the audience. Anyway, here it is:
